A day before the 1958 premiere of The Vikings, Kirk Douglas steered the longship of good publicity. He was hoisted almost 100ft above Times Square in a bosun’s chair and dangled alongside the world’s biggest film advertisement: a billboard shaped like a longship – 275ft long, in fact – that stretched across the Astor and Victoria theatres on Broadway. 

The ship was accompanied by the giant faces of Douglas and his co-stars – Tony Curtis, Ernest Borgnine, and Janet Leigh – a testament to the kind of star power that just doesn’t exist now. In a stunt befitting the spectacle of The Vikings, Douglas hung in the air and christened the billboard with a bottle. Reports said it was a bottle of water from a Norwegian fjord; Douglas insisted it was champagne.

In the film, Douglas and Curtis play half-brothers – Einar (Douglas), a vicious Norse prince; and Eric (Curtis), a slave and rightful king of England. Unaware that they are brothers, the rivals are destined to clash over Janet Leigh’s pointy-breasted Welsh maiden. It’s a star-studded, sword-swinging love triangle. 

But The Vikings belonged to Kirk Douglas. He was both leading man and producer, wielding a power and stormy disposition that caused the director, Richard Fleischer, to go by the mantra of “never work for a producer who is also the star”.

The Vikings was more than two years in the making – a glorious Technicolor mega-romp with replica longships, misty fjords and plenty of bearded men. Plus, plenty of hammy action and some occasionally hammy history. There’s no escaping that these Vikings are in fact bolshie Americans. Particularly amusing is jolly American icon Ernest Borgnine as Ragnar, father to Douglas’s Einar – despite Borgnine being just a year older than Douglas. Still, it doesn’t fall into the faux historical traps of other screen Vikings – there’s nary a horned helmet in sight.